All the world’s a stage: Performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

At Earlham College, students are no strangers to finding unique ways to learn about the world around them. Still, for nearly a decade, the College’s Department of Theatre Arts has set itself apart by asking students to build a dramatic world from scratch, then perform it at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland.  

This particular created world is centered around a steampunk fantasy trilogy by Richmond author Kathryn Clare Glen. Her first book, 2016’s The Misadventures of Martin Hathaway, fired the imagination of Professor of Theatre Arts Lynne Perkins Socey, who wondered what would happen if Earlham students brought Martin Hathaway to life on stage.  

The answer, it turns out, is a decade of transformative theater. The process of bringing the trilogy to the world’s largest arts and performance festival, made possible through the College’s Epic Experience initiative, has given students the kind of hands-on opportunities many never dreamed possible as undergraduates.  

With the first two shows, The Misadventures of Martin Hathaway in 2019 and The Further Misadventures of Martin Hathaway: Shipwrecked off Heramathea’s Cove in 2023, students figured out how to create an imaginative world using just what they could pack in their luggage (to this end, umbrellas did yeoman’s work). They’ve had to solve problems on the fly, gotten to perform before international audiences, and been captivated by seeing dozens of other shows at the festival.  

In August 2026, students brought the third and final original play inspired by the Martin Hathaway trilogy, Captain McNamara’s Revenge, to Edinburgh. When the show wrapped this summer, so did the story about a small, bold band of young people who overcame obstacles to show the world they could do something extraordinary. It’s a tale that could be lifted from the pages of a steampunk fantasy — but in this instance, it’s not fiction at all, but pure Earlham magic.  

“It was such a special experience,” said Brianna Miller ’21, who starred in 2019 as Captain Daisy Fitzgerald McNamara in the first production. “It was my first time ever leaving the country, and it was just so awesome to be able to see so many different kinds of theater once we got to Edinburgh. And it really helped me expand my understanding of what theater is.”  

Dreaming of the Fringe  

Long before Perkins Socey had ever heard about The Misadventures of Martin Hathaway, she and Mia Slayton, associate professor of theatre arts and associate dean of the visual and performing arts, had dreamed of taking students to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.  

The performing arts festival was established in 1947 as an unofficial offshoot of the Edinburgh International Festival (on the festival’s fringe), and takes place every August.  

The festival is a global celebration of arts and culture on a massive scale, and in 2025 featured more than 50,000 performances across nearly 4,000 shows. There’s theater, comedy, dance, circus, cabaret, children’s shows, musicals, opera, music, spoken word, and more, and for students who are interested in the performing arts, it is a true feast, the professors said.  

“Just to see so many stories, and so many people who want to see the stories, it feels like ‘I’m valid. It’s possible to do the things I really care about,’” Perkins Socey said. “That’s the essence of what I hope people come away with.”  

But the dream of taking students to the festival seemed likely to remain just that until 2017, when Earlham launched the Epic Advantage — now known across the College as Epic Experience, which guarantees every student funding of up to $5,000 to participate in a career focused experience.

For the professors, the initiative was the green light they had been waiting for.

But what play would they do? In the spirit of the festival and to avoid copyright issues, Perkins Socey and Slayton were interested in staging a devised play rather than a scripted one. In devised theater, performers, directors, designers, and others collaborate to build a show from the ground up using improvisation, movement, and more.  

“We presented students with all kinds of different ideas to choose from,” Slayton said. “And they were just really excited about this novel, The Misadventures of Martin Hathaway. So we went with that.”  

Enter Martin and Daisy, stage right  

Glen’s trilogy begins with a hapless history teacher from Earth, Martin Hathaway, who gets drunk at his bachelor party with his friends and falls off a cliff and lands with a crash in another world, called Arnica.  

Specifically, he crashes through the skylight of Captain Daisy Fitzgerald McNamara’s library. Daisy is a steampunk pirate captain with a bold attitude who cruises on an airship with her crew, called the Unpredictables.  

There are adventures aplenty, and also powerful lessons about community and the kind of friends who become a chosen family. Those are ideas that resonate strongly with college students, Perkins Socey said.  

“It is a found family. It’s us. It’s a collection of weirdos, right, who were like, ‘You be you, boo. How do I support you in being you?’” 

Perkins Socey and Glen are friends, and when the Richmond Civic Theatre did a radio adaptation of her first novel, the die was cast.  

“They had so much fun, and were so into it, that Lynne was like, ‘I want to know what this is about,’” said Glen, who also co-owns a local bookstore and recently began working on campus as an executive assistant for the Office of Academic Affairs.  

“Lynne really saw a spark then where the Earlham students could get behind this, too,” Glen said. “She reached out and told me about her vision for all three books. At that time, I had only written one, so it was a very ambitious vision.”  

Perkins Socey adapted the radio play into an original script, which became the starting point for the first play.  

“The students at Earlham really added to it quite a lot, and that was really just a fun, exciting experience,” Glen said. “Watching them work collaboratively has been really cool.”  

For Glen, it has been wonderful to see her work come alive on the stage. She even went to Edinburgh as a crew member on the production of the first play, getting a front-row seat to stagecraft that brought Arnica to life.  

In the books, the Unpredictables travel on an airship hoisted by a giant red balloon.  

“What they do in the production to make that happen, which is very steampunk and fun and visually beautiful, is they use umbrellas a lot,” Glen said. “You can pack these and take them on an airplane, and carry them down the street, and it’s wonderfully practical.  

 They’ll have these big red umbrellas, and they’ve got the ship’s steering wheel painted on them, and they twirl them when the ship is flying.”  

The actors also used their bodies to evoke the set. Miller, from the first Martin Hathaway, recalls a scene in which the actors needed to enter a cave.  

“All these people were just creating this kind of shape with their bodies, and creating a tunnel effect, as a few of us went through the tunnel,” Miller said. “It created this almost domino-like thing where the people at the beginning would have to go all the way to the end and help create that shape. It was really fun and playful, and I was responsible for specifically researching a lot of the movement. That was probably the most research-heavy theatrical thing that I had ever done at that point.”  

Each play has been different because each is a collaborative endeavor.  

“They’ve had different visual elements that have been just so fantastic. And seeing the students’ interpretations of the characters has been amazing,” Glen said. “It’s also amazing to see the audience respond to the jokes, because as a book author, you don’t get that. People read it, and maybe later they’ll tell you that it was funny, but in real time, seeing people react to it is just fantastic.”

 

The power of theater 

Creating this kind of theater can be powerful, Miller said. Though she had dreamed of acting since childhood, she was intensely shy until finding her footing in high school and college theater. By the time she was a sophomore at Earlham, she knew she wanted to pursue the craft professionally.  

In Edinburgh, she got a peek at what that would look like, performing on stage and taking in as many other shows as she could. She and the other actors also donned their costumes, which in her case included high-heeled boots and goggles, and walked around the steep cobbled streets of Edinburgh, singing pirate crew air shanties to passersby to entice them to come to the show. Walking in the boots hurt. But the crowd’s reactions made it worthwhile.  

“It was just so special to perform such a strong woman, such a vulnerable woman, a woman that everyone on stage immediately respected,” Miller said.  

In the years since graduating, she has earned her MFA in acting from Case Western Reserve University and performed this summer at the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City, Utah. Throughout, she has brought lessons from Martin Hathaway and her theater studies at Earlham: the importance of ensemble work, research and leadership skills, learning how directors think, and understanding other sides of theater.  

“All of that is really useful as a performer, in order to be well-rounded,” she said. 

Building the world  

Jordan Wolfe ’20 hadn’t done much devised theater work before portraying the first Martin Hathaway in the 2019 production.  

“It was pretty much how do we communicate these different locations, and different story beats with things that we can fit in a suitcase,” he said. “So really, it was very much a period of discovery, and learning about everyone, and learning how to navigate this script in such a unique way.”  

In addition to acting, he did the sound design for the first Martin, writing transition music and soundtracks that would give richness and ambiance to the world of Arnica. As a young college student, the opportunity made available through the theatre arts department was dazzling. He also had never flown or visited Europe before that trip. At the festival, he saw  

traditional Chinese theater, new plays in development, musicals, and much more.  

“Just being able to be in a place where there’s so much art all the time was life-changing, honestly,” said Wolfe, who is a working actor in the Midwest.  

Syd Miles ’28, a current student majoring in theatre arts, was the assistant director of the third installment of the trilogy, Captain McNamara’s Revenge. She was unable to go to Scotland with the rest of the cast and crew because of a prior commitment. Still, the experience of working on the show, which was performed at Earlham at the end of the spring semester, was very rewarding, Miles said.  

“It’s a completely devised piece, so this show didn’t exist until we made it,” she said. “We came up with how the world works and how the characters work. What can we do to communicate certain things because we have a limited amount of time, a limited amount of space, and a limited amount of props because we have to fly them all to a different country? There was a lot of freedom to develop things that hadn’t existed in other plays.”  

Two whole weeks of rehearsals were devoted to reviewing old props from other shows and  brainstorming ways to use them for the third Martin Hathaway. Umbrellas once again made the cut.  

“Umbrellas were snowstorms, they were ship gears, they were trees, they were railings. They were everything,” Miles said. 

As assistant director, Miles helped actors remember their lines, worked as a backstage hand during costume changes, and ran props. She also worked on the marketing team, helping create social media posts, the physical boards advertising the show outside the theater, and more.  

“I think there’s a lot of buzz and excitement about getting to perform somewhere that’s not our own theater, that’s literally across the world,” Miles said.

“That’s a very exciting thought for a lot of people,” she said. “And that there are going to be people from all over the world who are passionate about theater, that they’re going to get to meet and talk to. That’s also very exciting.”  

As the last applause faded from Edinburgh, a decade of Earlham ingenuity and twirling red umbrellas will come to an end. But for the alumni and students who found their theatrical voices in The Misadventures of Martin Hathaway, the magic of that small, bold band of  young people will live on. With enough imagination, they know, a world can be built from scratch.  

This story was written by Abigail Curtis and originally published in the fall 2026 edition of Earlhamite magazine. Photos by Josh Smith.

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About Earlham College 

Earlham College and Earlham School of Religion foster a collaborative learning community that inspires and motivates students with opportunities and experiences so they can become catalysts for good in a changing world. Located in Richmond, Indiana, Earlham is one of U.S. News & World Report’s Top 100 national liberal arts colleges and offers one of the top 20 classroom experiences in the nation, according to the Princeton Review.